"Good Mrs. Abigail said of me, That I had a splatter Face, like an over grown School-boy."

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Crotchets

I have a nagging sense that I'm missing an important link; but I should post these while I still have them open:

1. I am intrigued by this book on midwifery in the seventeenth century ("with much "strugling [sic], halings, and enforcements" midwifes would
attempt to pull babies out before labour had even begun, and a hooked
stick, or "crotchet", was used in the place of forceps.") And of course I am tickled by the article's author being named Alison Flood.

Seidel learned a lot about libido and its
excruciations from John Berryman, the original “phallus-man.” The
Berryman/Seidel predicament is as follows: to be a straight man is to
want to have sex all the time; to want to have sex all the time is to be
a buffoon; to be a buffoon is to occupy an amusing, though limited,
point of view. The imagination, which ranges over all points of view and
samples the full panoply of human appetites, finds the salivating
buffoon it is tethered to pitiful, or sickening, or dangerous, or
doomed. This makes self-caricature—the buffoon seen from the point of
view of the imagination—the central mode in both Berryman’s and Seidel’s
poems.

(I have been on a bit of a Seidel kick lately, I unearthed a Collected while packing & discarding books. I'd always known and admired "Poem by the bridge at Ten-Shin" but there is much more in that vein in the rest of his recent work.)